Belfast Live spent a night sleeping rough in heart of Belfast to get a first-hand experience of what the city's homeless have to face

William is a 27-year-old university graduate who I met sleeping in a doorway on Great Victoria Street; he has long brown hair, a scruffy beard and only one sleeping bag and the clothes on his back to call his own.

With a plethora of GCSEs and A Levels to his name, not to mention an English degree, one could be excused for not being able to understand why this young man has ended up living in sub-zero temperatures being forced to rely on the goodwill of others to eat and simply live.

The Belfast native was working in a graduate post within a major city bank when his life began to dissemble: his brother died in a car crash and he began to walk a path of alcohol and drugs.

“Everything was grand right up until that night; I had a decent job, a girlfriend and a positive future ahead of me," he said.

“But I started to drink too much and eventually that led to the drugs which in fairness put far too much pressure on my parents.

“I got started on weed and eventually found myself taking speed [amphetamine sulphate] to deal with my own pain.

“I started to become out-of-control and violent so one night last October I just left and my parents didn’t follow me. I don’t blame them.”

Craig Weir shivers amid the descending temperatures in the early hours

William was one of a number of homeless people I met while sleeping rough for a night on the streets of Belfast.

The first thing you notice when you sit on the shutter of a closed shop, in my case a shop just in front of City Hall, is the unintentional ignorance of the public.

For little over an hour I sat across from one of the biggest tourist attractions Belfast has to offer – the Christmas Continental Market – and only two people spoke to me: a teenage girl who asked was I cold and offered me money, which I refused but subsequently donated to charity, and a family who stopped to ask if I wanted any food.

The outstanding generosity of these people simply highlights what we already know about Belfast – that the people who live in it, and indeed in Northern Ireland as a whole, are some of the kindest, generous and warm-hearted people you could possibly find.

But it still prompts the question: why is more not being done to aid the homeless people of our city in their most dire time of need?

It's surely approaching freezing, I’m sitting outside a major book store in the city centre with four layers of clothing on, a woolly hat and a thick set of gloves when I spot former DUP health minister Jim Wells.

The South Down MLA was waiting to enter Michael O’Neill’s book signing when I thought it appropriate to ask him why he thinks homelessness is such a problem in Belfast.

“I don’t really know because it’s not really an issue in my own constituency, there would be very few if any people sleeping rough in South Down," he explains.

“I suspect that the capital always attracts people from various parts of the world, particularly people with addiction or mental health problems because they believe that’s where the services are.

“However, I am very surprised that there is a problem with homelessness in Belfast because we’re not a huge metropolis like London or Birmingham and so it’s strange when we still have this problem in the 21st Century."

When pressed on what he thinks Stormont or Belfast City Council can do to try and relieve the plight of our homeless, the former minister told me: “We have a chronic of new social housing in Northern Ireland.

"The market has crashed and many developers have gone out of business and as a result we are now 9,000 units short of affordable social housing and housing-to-rent.

“What we are seeing in the streets is an indication of that problem and it is going to take quite a few years to make up that difference.

This issue falls under our bailiwick, Paul Givan’s department, and I know that he takes homelessness extremely seriously and is looking at it as a matter of urgency.”

As I attempted to sleep in a side street of Victoria Avenue I came across volunteers for a group called Compassion Belfast whose aim is: "imagine hope revived, dignity restored, thinking reformed and brokenness repaired in our city."

The group were talking to and giving vital supplies to some of the city’s homeless people and they told me their desire to help people was at the forefront of all they do.

“We are here because we are Christians and we believe God wants us to do something to help the people of this city," said Andrea McGardle.

“Tonight is our launch night and we are planning to be out as often as we possibly can; we are really planning to capture the heart of the city so anything of need, that’s what we are hoping to be into."

After wandering around the city for a number of hours I eventually decided to sleep in the entrance of Pottingers Entry on a cardboard box with a sleeping bag and a coat as a pillow.

The night was cold and noisy but not what I had expected: by 3.30am I had gotten around an hour's sleep and my feet were like blocks of ice.

Although the awkwardness from sleeping on the ground was uncomforable, the primary irritation was the sound of people, the banging of bins or the shouting and singing from drunken revellers which made it almost impossible to sleep.

Although this experience was certainly unpleasant and something I would never wish to repeat again, what it has taught me is that the heart and desire of the people of Belfast to help their fellow citizens could never be stronger.